s acknowledged plays,
there are only two, "The Comedy of Errors" and "The Winter's Tale,"
which do not furnish more to our store of familiar quotations than this
play does, rich though it is with Shakespeare's ripest thought and most
splendid utterance. And yet by a strange compensating chance, it
furnishes the most often quoted line; a line which not one in a million
of those that use it ever saw where Shakespeare wrote it, or if they had
any brains behind their eyes, they would not use it as they do. For by
another strange chance it happens that this line is entirely perverted
from the meaning which Shakespeare gave it. As it is constantly quoted,
it is not Shakespeare's. The line is:

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

This has come to be always quoted with the meaning implied in the
following indication of emphasis: "One touch of _nature_ makes the
_whole world_ kin." Shakespeare wrote no such sentimental twaddle. Least
of all did he write it in this play, in which his pen "pierces to the
dividing asunder of soul and spirit and of the joints and marrow, and is
a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." The line which
has been thus perverted into an exposition of sentimental brotherhood
among all mankind, is on the contrary one of the most cynical utterances
of an undisputable moral truth, disparaging to the nature of all
mankind, that ever came from Shakespeare's pen. Achilles keeps himself
aloof from his fellow Greeks, and takes no part in the war, sure that
his fame for valor will be untarnished. Ulysses contrives to provoke him
into a discussion, and tells him that his great deeds will be forgotten
and his fame fade into mere shadow, and that some new man will take his
place, unless he does something from time to time to keep his glory
bright. For men forget the great thing that was done, in favor of the
less that is done now.

For time is like a fashionable host
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
And with his arms outstretched as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer. Welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing. O let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was;
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigor of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.

And then he immediately adds that there is one point on which all men
are alike, one touch of human nature which